I remember this came with a SoundBlaster card back in the early 90s. This was the delight of the adults back then (I was just about 10 then) who got fooled into getting hours and hours of psychotherapy sessions from Dr Sbaitso. And it kindof worked... But it's amazing how a simple program could give the appearance of thinking whereas most of it happened inside our own heads responding to questions. Nowadays we have LLMs which while they don't use deflection as the main trick, we are still projecting some kind of intelligence to it.
This was a fantastic piece of software that was included with your Sound Blaster card.
At that time, it was uncommon to have a sound card, most computers had a PC speaker that produced beeps and in some really rare cases (Star Control 2 did this) played a low fi version of what would have been sound card output.
You spent your $179, and suddenly games had some kind of midi/wav support.
This had a synthesized voice at your machine which at the time was magical. I was completely blown away at the age of ten, and it definitely kept my interest in computing.
I bought my first sound card SB Pro 2.0 in the early 90s and it came with Dr Sbaitso. We had lots of fun making it say different things, especually in our language (not English).
I think it was the first time I heard synthesized text to speech, really cool at the time.
And the other, other demo - The Elements. I vaguely remember it was sort of a multimedia engine that would read a text file on which movies (I think they were autodesk .fli files, and which midi and wav files to play and when.
I remember this came with a SoundBlaster card back in the early 90s. This was the delight of the adults back then (I was just about 10 then) who got fooled into getting hours and hours of psychotherapy sessions from Dr Sbaitso. And it kindof worked... But it's amazing how a simple program could give the appearance of thinking whereas most of it happened inside our own heads responding to questions. Nowadays we have LLMs which while they don't use deflection as the main trick, we are still projecting some kind of intelligence to it.
I remember sound blaster 16 in 1996.
We long for the days when anything we do on computers was kept in strict confidence.
This was a fantastic piece of software that was included with your Sound Blaster card.
At that time, it was uncommon to have a sound card, most computers had a PC speaker that produced beeps and in some really rare cases (Star Control 2 did this) played a low fi version of what would have been sound card output.
You spent your $179, and suddenly games had some kind of midi/wav support.
This had a synthesized voice at your machine which at the time was magical. I was completely blown away at the age of ten, and it definitely kept my interest in computing.
I prefer the versions hosted by archive.org: https://archive.org/search?query=sbaitso
Especially the "no voice" one, which runs much faster: https://archive.org/details/SBAITSO_TDY
I bought my first sound card SB Pro 2.0 in the early 90s and it came with Dr Sbaitso. We had lots of fun making it say different things, especually in our language (not English).
I think it was the first time I heard synthesized text to speech, really cool at the time.
I also recall if you swear at it quite a few times he'd start spewing numbers everywhere as part of fake fault sequence. Used to crack me up.
Dr. Sbaitso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso
...
Clean Language questions might be good.
Clean Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40085678 :
> Clean Language questions : https://cleanlearning.co.uk/blog/discuss/clean-language-ques...
Don’t forget the other demo - “I’m a talking parrot. Please talk to me!”
And the other, other demo - The Elements. I vaguely remember it was sort of a multimedia engine that would read a text file on which movies (I think they were autodesk .fli files, and which midi and wav files to play and when.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijq8pcr_vkg
Found a video: https://youtu.be/wGoxNnDq5yA?si=Gqf902GVMEk3dyKH&t=49
Parity error...
Too little data, so I make big.